Next step was to lay out our pieces roughly to see whether we had enough raw material to do what we’d planned. Lesley had been collecting cardboard boxes and tubes for a few weeks and it turned out that we had almost exactly the right amount, although we were required to devour a Flake Easter Egg early in order to use its box – sometimes you have to suffer for your art (at least I think that’s how it went down – it may be that we were just desperate for a bit of chocolate one evening – you know how it is!).

Having decided that we had plenty boxes, we added more detail…

Once we’d got the boxes and tubes in place, we made some paper cones to top the turrets, added some height to our large Bisto turret, some card prisms to the top of our Bran Flakes towers…

…and a facade on the grrreat big building at the back…

Then it was time to paint.

We had to go out and buy paint, which meant we had to disrupt our flow to get washed and dressed first, then headed to B&Q where they have Dulux testers on a 3 for £1 deal. They didn’t have exactly the shades for brick and slate that we were after, so we picked up 6 pots and mixed them together to give a nice red brick and slate roof.

We made sure that we also got plenty paint on socks…

…and hands…

Then we took our newly painted building bits…

…and re-assembled them into Hogwarts…

This model is only designed to be viewed from the front, so we didn’t bother to paint the back. You might notice the large turret (beside the Flake Easter Egg) having a bit of a bashed roof. That was something to do with a water pistol launching off the windowsill right on to the point of that cone. No idea how it happened, but I’m pretty certain it defied the laws of physics.

The next step was to draw on some detail. Some windows, detailing in the brickwork, and some numbers, because why not?? Then we taped the bits together into two easily transportable halves.

The whole point of this was to enter an Easter Egg competition at James’ nursery school, so we needed to add our Harry Potter egg (created by Lesley), wearing a black wizard’s cloak and riding a broom stick (paintbrush)…

In the end, James didn’t win the competition (we probably gave him just a little bit too much help), but we certainly had a lot of fun building Hogwarts!